The present invention relates to an improved means of making milkshakes and other frozen drinks. Currently the two commercially prevalent methods of making milkshakes and other frozen drinks are: 1) placing frozen ingredients such as ice cream scoops or ice or frozen fruit into a blending/mixing receptacle, then adding liquid such as milk or juice or water, and then blending them together, or 2) using a dispensing freezer of the type in which liquid ingredients are automatically fed into a freezing cylinder, agitated by a dasher in the cylinder during the freezing operation, and then dispensed when desired through a front discharge valve.
The first method, while delivering an excellent quality milkshake or frozen drink, takes too much time and labor to be viable in high volume fast-food restaurants, where a major portion of the potential market lies. The second method, using a dispensing freezer, dominates the fast-food market, yet possesses several serious short-comings. The required dispensing freezer equipment is expensive to purchase, and very time consuming and expensive to clean and maintain. In addition, the quality of product this equipment produces, by its nature, does not recreate the "old fashioned" style lumpy/slushy texture that can only be achieved by blending frozen ingredients together with liquid ingredients and then serving immediately. Consumers do not respond nearly as favorably to the homogeneous texture produced by the dispensing freezer equipment as they do to the old fashioned texture, and therefore, these dispensing freezer drinks do not sell well, holding less than 3% market share of total restaurant beverage sales today.
The overall goal of this invention is to enable the creation of a consumer preferred old fashioned texture milkshake or other frozen drink that will fit into the operational constraints of today's high volume fast-food restaurants. In order to meet the operational constraints of today's fast-food restaurants this invention was developed to achieve three objectives.
The first objective is to create a milkshake or other frozen drink in 30 seconds or less. In the fast-food market literally every second of preparation time is critical. By enabling preparation time to be reduced by even a few seconds, a number of features of this invention are significant improvements over the existing art.
The second objective is to provide a frozen drink machine which requires very little labor for cleaning between servings or at the end of the day, and which improves safety from bacterial concerns. Both of the existing methods of preparation require excessive amounts of clean-up time, either between servings in the case of the blended method, or at the end of the day in the case of the dispensing freezer. In addition, because this cleaning is often poorly done, or neglected entirely, consumers are often put at risk of consuming unsafe food products. This is a serious health risk which this invention addresses in new and novel ways.
A third object of the present invention is to achieve levels of whipping/aeration of the frozen drink of at least 15% of total volume. This level of whipping is important for two reasons. First, it is critical to keeping ingredient costs of this new method in competitive alignment with milkshakes and frozen drinks produced by dispensing freezers, which are whipped to this level of aeration and higher. Second, whipping also substantially improves flavor delivery of a frozen drink by improving a consumer's ability to taste the drink as their sense of smell senses the frozen drink's aroma trapped inside the tiny bubbles created by the whipping process.